male gaze is not 'when person look sexy' or 'when misogynist make film'

death of the author is not 'miku wrote this'

I don't think you have to read either essay to grasp the basic concepts

death of the author means that once a work is complete, what the author believes it to mean is irrelevant to critical analysis of what's in the text. it means when analysing the meaning of a text you prioritise reader interpretation above author intention, and that an interpretation can hold valid meaning even if it's utterly unintentional on the part of the person who created the thing. it doesn't mean 'i can ignore that the person who made this is a bigot' - it may in fact often mean 'this piece of art holds a lot of bigoted meanings that the author probably wasn't intentionally trying to convey but did anyway, and it's worth addressing that on its own terms regardless of whether the author recognises it's there.' it's important to understand because most artists are not consciously and vocally aware of all the possible meanings of their art, and because art is communal and interpretive. and because what somebody thinks they mean, what you think somebody means, and what a text is saying to you are three entirely different things and it's important to be able to tell the difference.

male gaze is a cinematographic theory on how films construct subjectivity (ie who you identify with and who you look at). it argues that film language assumes that the watcher is a (cis straight white hegemonically normative) man, and treats men as relatable subjects and women as unknowable objects - men as people with interior lives and women as things to be looked at or interacted with but not related to. this includes sexual objectification and voyeurism, but it doesn't mean 'finding a lady sexy' or 'looking with a sexual lens', it means the ways in which visual languages strip women of interiority and encourage us to understand only men as relatable people. it's important to understand this because not all related gaze theories are sexual in nature and if you can't get a grip on male gaze beyond 'sexual imagery', you're really going to struggle with concepts of white or abled or cis subjectivities.

:whispers: also Death of the Author means you have to exercise self-criticism and recognise the bias YOU as the audience bring to interpreting a piece of work. Yes, your reading is valid. But to what extent are you extrapolating from your own experiences, privileges & lacks of privilege, past traumas, etc.? How might this affect your interpretation of the text?

More people need to understand that part, too.

reblog for noises

I would download tiktok if it was only cat pov

Better than most tv

Supposedly someone donated $1mil to the project to eliminate predators/turn them into herbivores. Imagine the good money like that could have done for actual conservation projects instead of this nonsense.

Why support actual conservation when you can fund nonsense like this instead? 😬😬😬

In the UK there are around 430,000 foxes. Each fox must eat an average of 8 rodents a day. That means you would need to release over 3.4 million of these robotic rodents every single day just to feed one species in one country.

Now scale that up and imagine how many billions of these you'd need to feed every predator in every country. It's beyond stupid.

On the flip side, if one of these robotic rodents = one real life mouse or rat saved:

One female mouse can have up to 10 litters in a year, with numbers ranging typically from 5-14 pups each (average number that survive is closer to 7 or 8, but we'll go with 8)

Numbers are very similar for rats, so we'll just go with the above numbers.

Since obviously predatory species aren't taking out every single rodent ever, we can assume that each of these rodents has the capacity to become a breeding pair with a rodent that would otherwise not be eaten.

So if these robots fed the foxes of the UK and totaled to 3.4 million robots in a year, and each robot is equal to one mouse or rat saved...

Roughly 8 pups per litter x 10 litters per year = 80 new mice added to the population per breeding adult mouse per year

3.4 million rats/mice saved from being eaten by foxes x 80 new mice added to the population per breeding adult mouse saved = 272,000,000 (272 million) new mice/rats added to the population for every year this project is a success.

And this is just the number OP stated for foxes in the UK alone. There are many other predatory species living in the UK (both native such as owls and other raptors, and invasive such as domestic and feral cats), some of which rely solely on mice or rats. The amount of mice and rats consumed total by every predatory species in the UK alone is probably in the mid-to-high millions, and as I'm sure everyone knows, there are still plenty of mice and rats in the country. If the predators of the UK would be made to instead start hunting robotic mice and rats, we're talking potentially many multiple billions of new mice and rats added to the breeding population every year in the UK alone.

That's not good for people, since wild mice and rats can carry fatal diseases, but it's also not good for the wild mice and rats as they suddenly need to compete even more heavily with each other for resources and have more chance of spreading diseases and parasites to each other. Not to mention, with all of these new rodents needing to eat, we would see significantly more crop damage and loss, and there would be significant damage and loss to native plant species as well. Also, this should go without saying, but predatory species typically physically are incapable of surviving solely on plant matter, especially when relegated plant matter found in their natural habitats.

This entire project, if ever taken seriously, genuinely attempted to be implemented, and even in some slight way were to become successful, would be a disaster and a death sentence to the whole of nature and ecology as we know it.

Oh don't worry, they have a solution to that!

They believe they can control the fertility of every single wild animal on earth using birth control and/or biomedical engineering. Cause that's totally feasible. And even if it was somehow possible, imagine the costs of having to give birth control to billions and billions of animals worldwide. Where would the money and resources from that come from? Is that really the best use of government money when there are millions of people starving and living in poverty or on the streets?

Source

Let’s go

Creative way of saving camels from getting run over

my favourite things about this video:

1) the amount of time that went into considering this approach, which is a resounding 0.00 seconds

2) the baby's screm - yes it's sad bc the poor lil guy is scared but the way his yells for momma hitch with the guy's running have me lmao ngl

3) the guy either had the incredible good fortune or the foresight to put the baby between himself and momma so he could make a break for it. it was too quick. Too deliberate and almost instinctive. He has done this before.

4) the victory skips and turban twirling.

10/10 but please for the love of god there has to be a better way camels kick people to death

i feel like we're ignoring an important scientific fact, which is that this guy grabbed, at the minimum, 35 kilograms of terrified baby camel and did a fucking 6-second olympic sprint while being chased by, wikipedia informs me, 300-540 kilograms of angry adult camel.

the human body is capable of amazing things when it notices that it just picked up something that half a ton worth of pissed off camel would very much like to have back

okay okay so like i don’t wanna kill the party but i just saw an instagram shop selling a shirt that says now i am become death the destroyer of worlds in barbie font and i just sigh i just like i get the novelty of barbie and oppenheimer weekend but i have got to stress the bomb changed the entire world forever and wiped out over a quarter of a million people i think maybe we gotta kinda take a step back here when we start selling it as if it’s fun hot girl summer fodder

before you start babygirling oppenheimer just know that from what i’ve heard the film does not address downwinders, does not have a singular japanese person in it, and exploited our museums by claiming photos on loan for personal use (meaning they did not have to pay a penny to use them in the film despite being a multi-million dollar production).

I’m going to say it, even though it probably has been said. The bomb was tested in New Mexico. Nary a New Mexican has been consulted or the years long environmental consequences that weren’t that much lesser than Japan acknowledged, and people that suffered from the deathly rippling of the bombings are still alive.

https://www.axios.com/2023/07/20/j-r-oppenheimer-movie-new-mexico-hispanics

Some of the facts detailed in the article make the cinematic omission unforgivable. 

Compare paychecks with you co-workers. It is the best way to get equality.

In the USA it is illegal for them to even ASK you not to talk about your wages

Thank you if you reblog and please consider learning more about Narcissistic Personality Disorder and other stigmatized mental illnesses!

Image descriptions start.

A series of six infographics titled, “Understanding NPD Part 1.” Each image shows some simple line art with text.

1. A person with a confused expression has question marks floating by their head. A thought bubble coming from them shows a heart shape. The text says: As a narcissist, I often question how I experience love and how to express love properly.

2. The text says: After all, 2 common ways NPD develops are from: 1) Being shown excessive love as a child and/or never being told no – unintetionally overwhelming your ego. Spoiler: Your child won’t get NPD from “being loved too much,” the above is referring to excess entitlement. The drawing shows a smiling person surrounded by hearts. 2) A significant lack of love or praise given to the child, ultimately making them feel worthless. From there, a heightened ego develops to protect the person from feeling this way. The drawing shows a child trying to talk to an adult, who simply says, “I’m busy.” The child then thinks, “Fine I don’t need them.”

3. The text says: I experienced the latter. The drawing shows a frowning child whose eyes are hidden by their fringe. Under this is text that says: My parents never gave me much attention as a kid. The art shows the child playing with blocks alone More text says: And getting praise was an uphill battle. The art shows the child showing their parent a paper that says A+. The parent is tapping their chin with lowered eyebrows.

4. The text says: And now that leaves me a little unfamiliar with love. The art shows someone approaching the grown-up version of the child. The other person has a heart coming from their moth, and the now-grown person looks uncomfortable. Several question marks float above their head.

5. The text says: Often I am too preoccupied with supporting myself (the same way I did when I was a child( that I forget to extend support to other people. It was not something I was shown how to do, so I struggle with it now. The art shows the person thinking with their hand on their chin. They say: I look awesome today. There is a small sparkle by the words.

6. The text says: Even though it does not come easy to me, I am learning a lot about how to show love to other people (and to myself). Ongoing support and kindness from my friends has helped me a ton. The art shows the person standing in between to other people with speech bubbles. One has two exclamation points, and the other has squiggly lines. Text under this says: Even if I recover enough to no longer meet the critera for Narcissistic Personality Disorder someday, I am happy right now that I can teach people what it is really like and I will continue to do so in the future. Advocating for people like me goes a long way towards helping end false assumptions about the disorder and allows people to get the treatment they need.

The final image at the bottom of the OP is a purple userbox. The icon is a stethoscope, and the text says: This blog advocates for those with NPD, ASPD, DID, Psychosis, and any other marginalized disorders. Description end.

😈 You are not bound by the Hays code.

😈 You are allowed to have evil characters who are not punished by the narrative by the end of the story.

😈 You are allowed to have evil characters who win.

😈 You are allowed to have evil characters who make evil look fun and cool.

😈 You are allowed to make your fun, cool evil character the protagonist.

😈 You are allowed to glorify, romanticize and eroticize evil characters and villainous acts.

😈 You are not obligated to teach your audience a moral lesson.

I think this is my favorite post on the Internet right about now! Edit: And I just needed to Edit this Photo 4 TIMES till it worked here… #youarewelcome #tumblrnoob #learnhowtotumblr

A family

Embroidered Ties // Manaki Designs on Etsy

I'm just gonna slide this on in here for anyone that is interested in preserving old games. They take it very seriously too, they want an archive of every single game. Like, they have lists of every game ever released for a system, and once that system gets old enough, they add it to their archive and start collecting. Their latest addition was the Xbox 360, they opened that vault up in September 2022, and proudly announced they'd finished their collection of games for it back in April.

Also, while their game archives are almost entirely complete, they've got another project of archiving the manuals that came with those games, and that is... considerably less well filled out. Their collection of Xbox 360 manuals is especially rough, they've only gotten manuals for three games. So if you've got some Xbox 360 games kicking around, and the manual's still with them, please consider scanning them and submitting them to the site!

Game preservation is important, but people rarely consider preserving the manuals as well; I really respect Vimm's Lair for being so thorough in their archival work.

Sweet Dreams - Rora Blue

2020.

“Sweet Dreams explores the intricacies of everyday ableism and everyday ableist comments. Some of the comments recount dialogue said to the artist. Other phrases were submitted by other disabled and/or chronically ill individuals as documentation of comments that have been said to them. Through using recognizable objects associated with disability in correlation with playful colors, Sweet Dreams aims to reclaim objects commonly associated with pain and disrupt the narrative on what it means to be disabled.”

#now onto the more important thing: hummus#edit: i think what really gets me#is the implication that this woman is the only person that the hummus story would ever have worked on#that no one else would have believed the hummus story for even a moment#but this boy just happened to have a mother who did not know until that very moment that her favorite food was hummus#the one person on earth who took a single bite of hummus and thought#this explains all those orgasmic sounds#i need no further explanation#all i care about now is hummus (@unpretty)

kings supporting kings

method acting as himbos

One of the best letters I’ve ever seen just popped up on my Facebook memories. Still makes me laugh.

As today is the 50th anniversary of the moon landing, it’s a great time to revisit Dinah from Devon’s memory of this historic event. And yes, still makes me laugh.

Today is the 54th anniversary of the moon landing, but Dinah’s diary entry is still absolutely magnificent.